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| Traffic stops, jail don’t stop cell phone calls |
| By Joe Kovac Jr. |
| Published: 04/27/2009 |
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Jail may be one of the last places around where you can find large numbers of people and none of them on cell phones. Oddly enough, though, people in spots that could very well land them in the slammer often don’t seem to mind jabbering away on phones when police should probably have their full attention. A couple of months back, Monroe County sheriff’s Lt. Brad Freeman was clocking speeders on Interstate 75. From his patrol car, parked along the freeway just north of Bolingbroke, Freeman caught a glimpse of a woman blowing by at better than 90 miles an hour. In the instant she zipped past, Freeman could see that she was talking on her cell phone. When he pulled the woman over and walked up to her car, she was still chatting. “Ma’am, how are you doing today?” Freeman said. “The reason I stopped you ...” Freeman cut himself off. The driver was still gabbing. “When you get through talking, ma’am, I’ll be right here,” he said. “Just don’t forget me.” Half a minute later she hung up and, Freeman recalls, she “was not apologetic at all.” He says it used to be that when a cop stopped someone, it was usually just the officer and the person who’d been pulled over. “Now,” Freeman says, “you’ll have young people handing you their phones, saying, ‘Here, talk to my mom.’” While it is illegal in some places to talk on cell phones while driving, such measures have yet to catch on in Georgia. It is unlikely, however, that there will ever be laws governing cell phone use at the scene of routine traffic stops. “It’s amazing,” Bibb County sheriff’s Capt. Charlie Gunnels says. “One of our guys stopped someone the other day for speeding and the first thing she did was hand him her cell phone. She’d called a policeman friend of hers. ‘Here, this policeman wants to talk to you.’ ” Sometimes folks call friends and put their conversations with the cops on speakerphone. “They want someone to hear the police talking to them,” Gunnels says. Perhaps nowhere is the culture’s fondness of cell phones more evident than when someone is being hauled to jail. “They want the cell phone more than they do their wallet or their driver’s license,” Gunnels says. “They think they have a right to take that cell phone wherever they go.” Chief Deputy Billy Boney of the Twiggs County Sheriff’s Office says, “The phone is pretty close to being addictive and the first thing people want to do is spread the word, ‘I’m being arrested.’ ” When a person is booked into jail, most who’ll be staying a while have their clothes and belongings — cash and phones included — stuffed in a bag and stored. Most times the phones are turned off. Sometimes the jailers forget. Read more. If link has expired, check the website of the article's original news source. |
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